DEADLY POISON.

Otaki Mail, Volume 27, 3 November 1919, Page 4

DEADLY POISON.

THAT MAY KELL WAR.

At a recent war-exhibition in Washington there was shown for the first time a small bottle containing what is claimed to be the deadliest poison ever known.

This stricty-guardcd war secret was developed in the Bureau of mines by Professor' Lee Lewis, of the NorthWestern University, Evafiston, Illinois. It was manufactured in a speciallybuilt plant near Cleveland, called the “Mousetrap,” because every workman entering the stockade signed ah 'agreement not to leave the eleven-acre spaco until the war was won. The secret was thus protected.

The poison is caled Lewisite, after its inventor, and extraordinary claims are made for it. Ten aeroplanes carrying this stuff would have wiped out, it. is said, every vestige of life, animal and vegetable, in Berlin. One day’s output could have destroyed all file on Manhattan Island.

Three thousand tons of Lewisite were available for the American front in Prance on March Ist. % When the Armistice was signed Lewisite was being manufactured at the rate of ten t,ons a day.

According to accounts published in America”, one drop on the humand hand "would penetrate to the- blood, reach the liert, and killl the victim in agony. The specimen at Washington is set upon a pedestal, and completely isolated from the public, being guarded night and day. Allowing a high percentage for exaggeration, the fact remains that unless the above claims arc entirely misleading, Lewisite, acting as an intensified mustard gas, makes war so utterly destructive as to overshadow every other consideration. With this, manufacture proceeding and the long-dis-tance flying reported daily, no city anywhere will be safe unless war is absolutely prevented by the League of Nations enforcing total disarmament. In face of the threatened peril (says an exchange) most of the discussion at Paris seems irreevant, and trivial. Only scientists can say whether Lewisite and similar products which chemists are investigating possess all the deadly qualifies above indicated, but there can be no doubt as to the inevitable ‘trend of the investigations, which can only culminate in the production of war material the use of which if permitted would desroy the human race.